Saturday, March 28, 2009

Google Updater is installed when you install any Google product. It then sits in the background and checks for updates. I don’t want it to on my server. I wanted a browser that wasn’t IE 6.0 and I didn’t want the bloat ware of IE 8.0. So I installed Google Chrome as a light weight browser, that would not constantly require Microsoft Updates.

So how do you get rid of the Google Updater?

1) Go to Scheduled Tasks.

Either by Control Panel –> Scheduled Tasks

Explorer –> Windows –> Tasks

2) You will see the Google Updater sat there. It will start a process when the processor is Idle for 10 mins. Just delete this task and Google wont update anymore.

I initially thought that I could take the disks out of the P6DBS and undo the Caddy and just copy the data onto my laptop. I forgot the old IDE vs SCSI differences (http://www.mindconnection.com/library/computertips/ide-scsi.htm). But I was reminded about the beauty of SCSI and the way you can just “span” disks together to be seen as one by the operating system.

I stole the memory from the 6BTA3 to boot the P6DBS. I noticed that although it had 5 HDD, it only had power cables for 4 devices. So the first step was to copy all the data onto my Western Digital My Book (http://support.wdc.com/product/spec.asp?groupid=110&lang=en&print=y) I always thought 1 Tb of data was overkill, but I am slowly filling it!

After I had copied 16Gb of data of 2 of the drives, I noticed that my P6DBS was a dual processor motherboard, I decided to take the Pentium III out of the 6BTA3 and plug it in. It worked! It just said that I had 2x Pentium II. Oh well, wasn’t even expecting it to work to be honest! Then the first mistake – flashing the BIOS!!!

I went to SuperMicro (http://www.supermicro.com/support/bios/archive.cfm) site to get a new BIOS and used (http://www.bootdisk.com/) to create a Boot disk. Well that completely fried my machine and it constantly beeped after turning it on. Which according the web was the Power Unit failing (http://www.wimsbios.com/faq/solveamibiosbeepcodes.jsp). So I ripped the Power Supply Unit (PSU) out of the 6BTA3 (that ATX case was just a motherboard now!) and used that. This made the constant beeps turn into 7 beeps (apparently the graphics card was now not seated), and after taking out the memory it had a different number of beeps! So I thought, I need to recover the BIOS.

I followed this (http://www.wimsbios.com/faq/howtorecoveracorruptbios.jsp) guide and ended up setting the motherboard jumper and even took the CMOS battery out and left it over night (was 3am by now!). By this time frustration made me read the manual and release that I should have renamed the backed up BIOS (super.rom). I wish I had followed the instructions to the letter!!

So now I had no way off renaming the rom file as I needed to boot the P6DBS and hold down CTRL and HOME with the floppy disk in and it should reflash the drive reading the super.rom file.

So onto destroying the other machine so that I could use the floppy drive!

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

It has long annoyed me taken other frameworks that need config sections defined and spending the time copying the sections over, it would be so much easier if the Framework told you what bit of configuration it was trying to load. So I always use this abstract class for all of my config sections.

Next derive from this class rather than the .Net Framework class. e.g.

public class EmailTemplatesSection : SimianConfigurationSection

Once this has been completed your application will report a simple configuration exception if it cannot find your section in the config file. This takes 5 minutes to implement, but helps so much when you are configuring frameworks.

This then allows a really simple pattern when you want your configuration section.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Extension methods are so cool in your web layer so that you can easily convert your things between Json and your object. All you have to do now is decorate your classes with the DataContract/DataMember attributes. How simple is that?